Meet the Contractors Turning America's Police Into a
Paramilitary Force
You should know about them because they may already know
about you.

By John Knefel

February 02, 2013 "AlterNet"
-- The national security state has an annual budget of
around
$1 trillion. Of that huge pile of money, large amounts
go to private companies the federal government awards
contracts to. Some, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, are
household names, but many of the contractors fly just under
the public's radar. What follows are three companies you
should know about (because some of them can learn a lot
about you with their spy technologies).

“L-3
Communications is one of the main subcontractors
involved with production of the US’s lethal
Predator since the inception of the programme.
Predators are used by the CIA to kill ‘suspected
militants’ and terrorise entire populations in
Pakistan and Yemen. Drone strikes have escalated
under the Obama administration and 2013 has
already seen six strikes in the two countries.”

Unsurprisingly, L3 Communications is well connected
beyond the national security community. Its chief
financial officer recently spoke at Goldman
Sachs, at what the financial titan hilariously
refers to as a “fireside chat.”

L3 also
supplies local law enforcement with its
night-vision products and makes a license-plate
recognition (LPR)
device, a machine with
disturbing implications. LPR can be mounted on
cop cruisers or statically positioned at busy
intersections and can run potentially thousands of
license plates through law enforcement databases in
a matter of hours. In some parts of the country LPR
readers can track your location for miles. As the
Wall Street Journal
noted, surveillance of even “mundane” activities
of people not accused of any crime is now “the
default rather than the exception.”

L3
Communications embodies the totality of the national
security and surveillance state. There is only
minimal distinction between its military products
and police products. Its night-vision line is sold
to both military and law enforcement. Its
participation in the drone program is now, as far as
we know, limited to countries in the Middle East and
North Africa. But in the words of the New
York Times editorial board, “[i]t is not a
question of whether drones will appear in the skies
above the United States but how soon.” The NYT
estimates the domestic drone market at $5 billion,
likely a conservative estimate, and contractors will
vie for that money in the public and private sphere.
L3's venture into airports, the border of where
domestic policy meets foreign policy in the name of
national security, is therefore significant both
symbolically and materially.

In many ways,
that is the most important story of the post-9/11
United States: the complete evaporation of the
separation of foreign and domestic polices. Whether
we're talking about paramilitarized police,
warrantless wiretapping, inhumane prison conditions,
or drone surveillance, there exist few differences
between a United States perpetually at war and a
United States determined to police and imprison its
people in unacceptable ways and at unacceptable
rates.

Harris Corporation:
Stingray “IMSI catcher”

Harris Corp. is a
huge provider of national security and communications
technology to federal and local law enforcement agencies.
Though many people have never heard of it, Harris is a major
player in the beltway National Security community. President
and CEO William M. Brown was recently appointed to the
National Security
Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and in 2009 the
Secret Service offered Harris a contract to train its
agents in the use of Harris' Stingray line. The Secret
Service awarded the company additional contracts in 2012.

If you've heard of
Harris at all, it's likely been because its controversial
Stingray product has been
getting attention as an information-gathering tool with
major privacy implications. The Stingray allows law
enforcement to cast a kilometers' wide digital net over an
area to determine the location of a single cell phone signal
– and in the process collect cell data on potentially
hundreds of people who aren't suspected of any crimes. EFF
claims the device is a modern version of British soldiers
canvassing the pre-Revolutionary colonies, searching
people's homes without probable cause – exactly what the
Fourth Amendment was created to prevent.
EFF describes the process this way:

“A Stingray works
by masquerading as a cell phone tower—to which your
mobile phone sends signals to every 7 to 15 seconds
whether you are on a call or not— and tricks your phone
into connecting to it. As a result, the government can
figure out who, when and to where you are calling, the
precise location of every device within the range, and
with some devices, even capture the content of your
conversations.”

According to the
Electronic
Privacy Information Center (EPIC),the FBI has been using
similar technology since 1995. But a recent federal case,
United States v. Rigmaiden, has raised
Fourth Amendment questions regarding whether law
enforcement officials need to obtain a warrant before
employing a Stingray. The judge in that case determined that
the government hadn't provided enough information about how
the devices work, and
ordered that the information collected in Rigmaiden
couldn't be used in court.

What's especially
troubling about Stingrays is that the government either
won't say, or doesn't understand, how the technology works.
The WSJ
reported that the US Attorney making the requests
“seemed to have trouble explaining the technology.”

And it's not just the
federal government that uses Stingrays. As
Slate notes,referencing FOIA documents recently obtained
by EPIC, “the feds have procedures in place for loaning
electronic surveillance devices (like the Stingray) to state
police. This suggests the technology may have been used in
cases across the United States, in line with a stellar
investigation by LA Weekly last year, which reported
that state cops in California, Florida, Texas, and Arizona
had obtained Stingrays.”

Harris has been
tightlipped about the Rigmaiden case, but expect to
be hearing a lot about Stingrays in the future.

BI2 Technologies

BI2 makes a fine
pitch. Its iris-scanning technology
can be made to sound very appealing. Iris scans are
relatively non-invasive, there's no touching involved so the
likelihood of spreading disease is reduced, and as B12
states
on its Web site, "there are no lasers, strong lights or
any kind of harmful beams.” It also claims that iris
scanning is "strictly opt-in," and that a “user" (who in
most cases would be better described as an “arrestee”) “must
consciously elect to participate” in the scanning. (When I
was arrested by the NYPD while covering a protest, the scan
was voluntary -- though the NYPD didn't tell me that, a
protester did. But if I refused to submit to it I could have
been punished with an extra night in jail.)

Reuters
reported that BI2's iPhone-based iris scanner -- called
MORIS -- is capable of taking an accurate scan from four
feet away, “potentially without the person being aware of
it.” MORIS has drawn harsh condemnation from the ACLU. The
primary concern from privacy advocates is that law
enforcement will deploy this technology in an overly broad
way. ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley told Reuters
that he didn't want the police “using them routinely on the
general public, collecting biometric information on innocent
people.”

MORIS isn't just for
irises; it also scans faces. In 2011, the Wall Street
Journalreportedthat
the sheriff's office in Pinellas County, Florida, “uses
digital cameras to take pictures of people, download the
pictures to laptops, then use facial-recognition
technologies to search for matching faces.” New database
technology like Trapwire, a data mining system that analyzes
“suspicious behavior” in purported attempts to
predict terrorist behavior, makes face scanning potentially
more worrisome. Trapwire
uses at least “CCTV,
license-plate readers, and open-source databases” as input
sources, and although it doesn't employ facial-recognition
software, the incentives to combine these types of
technology is clear.

Beginning in 2014, BI2
will manage a national iris-scan database for the FBI,
called
Next-Generation Identification (NGI).Lockheed Martin is
also involved in building the
database.Much of BI2's iris data comes from inmates in
47 states, and despite BI2's claims that iris scanning
can't be gamed, that is not the case. Experts
showed last summer that the iris can be
“reverse-engineered” to fool the scanners, which are
generally thought to be more accurate than fingerprinting.

The
usual suspects lamented in 2011 that
iris scanning isn't used at airports or borders, but
security creep is difficult to combat, especially once
“national security” is invoked. Just days ago it was
reported that
the FBI is teaming with the Department of Homeland
Security to ramp up iris scanning at US borders. AlterNet
has previously reported that the
Department of Defense scans the irises of people
arriving at and departing from Afghanistan.

The story of BI2 is
important because the initial technology is superficially
appealing. The company's first projects were called the
Child Project, designed to help locate missing children; and
Senior Safety Net, developed to identify missing seniors
suffering from Alzheimer's. According to B12's Web site,
sheriffs' departments in 47 states use the
BI2 iris-scanning device and database, which makes it
easy to mobilize support to facilitate the safe return of
children and seniors.

While the desire to
find missing children and seniors is perfectly legitimate,
the collection of biometric data is a pandora's box. Once
it's opened, it's proven difficult if not impossible to
limit.

John Knefel is
the co-host of Radio Dispatch and a freelance writer
based in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter at
@johnknefel.

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